In the aftermath of disasters, clean drinking water may be impossible to find. Now, a porous gel infused with silver nanoparticles is in development. The invention may change the way water purification happens. The gel sucks in contaminated water and squeezes out purified water in mere seconds.
Are you ready for the Zombie Apocalypse? Are you sure? Your zombie killing kit needs to include the Zomstro Zombie Cleaver knife by Ka-Bar to ensure your survival and success in the undead realms of the future. Only the best equipped will last through the long night of the walking dead.
With technology evolving faster than the chimpanzees featured in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” large amounts of computers, TVs, mobile phones and other electronics are being tossed out on a regular basis. Help to fix the problem, and earn some big cash!
Combining art and nature is nothing new, but having live animals as participants in exhibitions is a bit more unusual. Luckily, these hermit crabs don’t move too fast, particularly since they have entire artistic cityscapes on their backs, fashioned meticulously out of plastic by Japanese artist Aki Inomata.
The Kikkerland Design Crew has reinvented the traditional rubber eraser in multiple innovative and fun ways to brighten up your office space- Who wouldn’t adopt an office rhinoceros?
Plants are beautiful. But up close, they’re inspiring, terrifying, and, well, just quite large.
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Some of our greatest inventors have looked to nature for inspiration. So it’s no coincidence that the earliest known designs for what would eventually become the modern airplane were all based on birds. Or why we may one day have nearly indestructible armor
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Researchers from Asia and Europe have developed the world’s lightest and thinnest organic circuits, which in the future could be used in a range of healthcare applications.
Lighter than a feather, these ultrathin film-like organic transistor integrated circuits are being developed by a research group led by Professor Takao Someya and Associate Professor Tsuyoshi Sekitani of the University of Tokyo, who run an Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology (ERATO) program sponsored by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), in collaboration with Siegfried Bauer’s group at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz, Austria.
The circuits are extremely lightweight, flexible, durable and thin, and conform to any surface. They are just 2 microns thick, just 1/5 that of kitchen wrap, and weighing only 3g/m^2, are 30 times lighter than office paper. They also feature a bend radius of 5 microns, meaning they can be scrunched up into a ball, without breaking. Due to these properties the researchers have dubbed them “imperceptible electronics”, which can be placed on any surface and even worn without restricting the users movement.
The integrated circuits are manufactured on rolls of one micron thick plastic film, making them easily scalable and cheap to produce. And if the circuit is placed on a rubber surface it becomes stretchable, able to withstand up to 233% tensile strain, while retaining full functionality.
“This is a very convenient way of making electronics stretchable because you can fabricate high performance devices in a flat state and then just transfer them over to a stretchable substrate and create something that is very compliant and stretchable just by a simple pick and place process.”
This prototype device is a touch sensor featuring a 12×12 array of sensors on a 4.8 cm x 4.8 cm circuit. It is made up of two layers, an integrated circuit layer and a tactile sensor layer.
With the development of these plastic electronics, the possibility for flexible, thin, large area electronics has been realized. In the future, the group would like to expand the capabilities of these circuits.
“The new flexible touch sensor is the world’s thinnest, lightest and people cannot feel the existence of this device. I believe this development will open up a wide range of new applications, from health monitoring systems, wearable medical instruments, and even robotic skins in the future.”
The results of this research were published in the July 25, 2013 issue of the journal Nature.
This content is provided by DigInfo.tv, AkihabaraNews Official Partner.
Via: University of Tokyo
Being a human’s great, but sometimes it would be cool to experience the world from a different perspective. I’d love to be this little wasp, hitching a ride on the back of a damselfly.
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Last week, we looked at bugs. This week, I’m sending you back into the bush to catch more of nature’s nuance on the macro level. For this week’s Shooting Challenge, photograph the wonder of plants.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
